Your choice of words betrays your point: information is just random facts, it is only when they are coherently integrated that they become data. As far as the article implies, there isn't much in the way of analysis or theoretical conclusions involved in this thesis. His supervisor is right: this is a waste of a PhD student's time and not appropriate for work at this level.
Yes, compiling the information may be hard, but difficulty does not research make. I wouldn't give this guy a PhD until he generates some significant results that could be applied to a country with completely different infrastructure, or even my next game of SimCity (possibly with the inclusion of Terrorist Strike disasters).
True. My first girl was from Estonia:) She was nice.
Sorry, but we don't care whether Estonian girls are "nice", the world has plenty of nice girls to go around. The question is: was she a hottie? Please include pics with your response or don't bother.
A right is something that you can have without taking away someone elses, that's one of the key qualities of it.
Sorry, but not everyone shares your libertarian definition. I should think that the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights can be considered the canonical reference on human rights. The very first line puts "inherent dignity" above "inalienable rights"; the only fundamental right is that of dignity, all other rights can be derived from that (eg: the Ontario Court of Appeal recently ruled that not allowing same-sex couples to marry is a violation of their dignity).
Paying taxes does not violate your dignity.
Article 3 states that "everyone has the right to...liberty", this allows us to deduce Articles 6 through 11 which lay out our rights within the justice system. Unfortunately, fair tribunals cost money. Would you suggest that having to pay for someone else's trial is a violation of your rights? Likewise, Article 21 requires your country to hold costly elections or facilitate democracy in some other way.
Article 3 also states that "everyone has the right to...security of person", which leads to Article 14, forcing your country to accept refugees, and Article 22, the "right to social security". Article 22, we are told, requires the State to use its economic resources to ensure the dignity and the "free development of...personality" for all people.
And the universal human rights which require goods and services just goes on and on. So I think it's safe to conclude that the rest of the world has a very different conception of "right" than you do.
Actually there's significant evidence that West Nile poses no threat to children. Some health officials in Ontario have gone so far as to hint* that intentionally exposing children to the virus will give them an immunity later in life when infection could have negative consequences. To date, an 18-year-old is the youngest fatality in Canada and very few children have come down with any symptoms at all.
* They can't actually recommend this for fear of lawsuits.:(
I don't know how they do it in your human rights backwater, but in Canada* we use common law; ie: innocent until proven guilty. Thank god we have the government to protect mistakenly arrested citizens from monsters like you.
Considering how much trouble the police had catching Briere in the first place, I'm not confident they'll be able to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. After all, why release his picture and risk spoiling the jury pool if they already had all the evidence they need?
* My Canada does not include Quebec.
You sir, are proof that just because you live in a place doesn't mean you know fuck-all about what is going on there. It's called due diligence, try it before you put your foot in your fucking mouth.
But parent's advice applies to reviews and other articles, certainly posts should not be held to as high a standard. The reviews are the equivalent of speeches or even written-on-dead-trees work, posts are just part of conversation.
If only/. actually had "editors", maybe we wouldn't be having this discussion. But if 1000s of people are going to read something, there is onus on the authour to put some care into it.
Following the standards isn't extra work, it's required work! Your clients may not be smart enough to explicitly specify it, but you're being hired to produce a site in HTML, not some approxiation to "HTML".
Of course if you slap some shit together in FrontPage and then try to standardise it'll cost more, but if you start out following the standards, I don't find them particularly onerous. (Other than, perhaps, the ALT tags, but hopefully you already have some kind of order to your image files.)
Tables are for displaying tabular data, they are not for layout. Spacing images are a kludge. CSS gives you much better control over layout without having to bend any users over. Slashdot is a nightmare because it's thrown together by people who put no pride in their work and have never bothered to refactor the HTML.
It's true, I've never tried out a screen reader. I trust that if I follow the WAI guidelines and it looks good in Lynx, that's enough. Have you ever read the WAI guidelines or used Lynx? Doesn't sound like it.
You don't shit in their beds so they shouldn't sleep in your washroom?
Maybe if New York had enough homeless shelters the "bums" wouldn't need to purchase reappropriated housing? What does it say about a society where some members feel a need to sleep in public washrooms? At least they're not out on the street where you might have to look at them.
Regardless of the social debate, public pay washrooms in Paris have a solution: the self-cleaning begins 15 minutes after you pay, whether you're still in there, or not.
It only takes double the time if you're just slapping together some crude approximation of HTML to start with. Just following standards gets you most of the way to accessibility. All of your examples of "regular features" are in fact gross abuse of HTML.
They're called Cascading Style Sheets. Nearly everyone's browser supports them. There's a reason they're called "standards". Maybe you'll get more business if you stop trying to fuck every user up the ass?
The point of ICBMs is not to actually deploy nuclear weapons, it's to have the ability to deploy them. Consider four classes of countries:
Those without nuclear weapons; eg: Iraq. These countries are susceptable to armies marching in and enacting regime changes.
Those with short-range nuclear weapons; eg: North Korea. These countries can keep infantry at bay, but their influence entirely ends at their border.
Those with medium-range nuclear weapons; eg: China. These countries can meddle in regional affairs, such as invading Tibet, because they can strike fifedoms of the World Powers.
Those with long-range nuclear weapons, the World Powers. These countries only need to worry about self-defense because of terrorists and they can meddle all over the world (eg: USSR in Cuba, US in Iraq).
China and India want to upgrade to World Powers. To do that they need mutually-assured-wounding power. They also need the military infrastructure to send their armies all over the place. The space race fulfills both of these needs.
I think you're missing the point: Plan9 is more than just another Unix kernel, it's the next species in the evolutionary chain. It'd make a lot more sense to grab all the hardware support and shit from Linux and put it in Plan9 than to try and genetically engineer Linux to such a higher state of being.
It's not great stuff: it's fluff! If you've taken any theoretical Computer Science, you'll realise that most of his ideas are fairly trivial and he's just wrapping them in a yummy candy coating for public consumption. Most of his "connections" between math and art or whatever are pretty tenuous and just an excuse for him to ramble on about his favourite things in life.
The only people amazed by GEB are people who aren't well read enough to have come across the ideas before and people whose understanding of the ideas is so tenuous that when he claims there's a deep connection they believe him.
Your brain has been corroded by using shitty programming languages: VB, Pascal, Turing. No wonder you don't like Haskell, it's for people who are smart. Not dumb fucks like you.
Yeah, but Perl's XML interfaces are far from optimal. Many languages support regular expressions, but I think even those who hate Perl would agree that Perl's support is the best.
What I want is a language foo such that: foo is to XML as Perl is to regular expressions
Perhaps that's why Australia and Canada have the two highest rates of immigration in the world? (Another interesting contrast is Canada's almost non-existant backlash to this policy.)
What do you mean "without provocation"? Israel is a political entity in direct defiance of the rights of the people who previously occupied that piece of land. The neighbouring states may have ulterior motives for not depreciating the Palestinians to the extent that the Western Powers did, but cast in a purely utilitarian light, their actions were consistant with other military campaigns that attempt to prevent ethnic cleansing.
If the Coalition of the Willing tried to set up Kurdistan in your neighbourhood and the Kurds were going to kick you out, I'd help you send them back to Iraq, buddy.
Regular expressions are not optimal for parsing most of the other forms of text. As XML eclipses plaintext as the most frequent MIME-type of online documents, Perl, with it's close integration of regular expressions, will no longer be the best of all possible duct tapes.
My first usage of "the Jews" refers to the set of people targetted by the "fundamentalist Muslims" (whom, I believe, tend not to check whether people are Zionists before blowing them up). My second usage is short for "the Jews who wanted to move to the location currently known as Israel", but you are correct that this is suboptimal: I should have used "the future-Israelis".
I assume the only anti-Jewish Palestinians are those who are fundamentalist Muslims (and therefore hate the Jews a priori) or those whose racism is a reaction to Zionism.
In an ideal liberal state, there is no drawback to being a racial minority. Some would go so far as to claim that being a racial minority is an advantage in some (less-than-perfect) liberal states such as Canada with affirmative action legislation.
Please excuse my simplification: Zionism appears to be a racist reaction to someone else's racism. This is not mature.
If there is statistical evidence that the colour of their skin significantly increases your danger, then I think this form of racial profiling is justified.
I'm not making a positive policy suggestion here. I'm simply pointing out that Zionism is racist (or at least excessively greedy) and anti-Zionists are usually racist. It appears that the only short-term solution is to seperate the fighting children.
Non-immigrant nations are not fully adult. Adolescent, at the most. Also: chronological age has nothing to do with maturity; maturity is a state of mind.
The only non-prejudiced way to define a group of people is by shared beliefs. And if those beliefs happen to be religion, then the defined group is archaic.
I theorise that the non-religious beliefs held by the Jews of Europe at the end of WW2 would give them no reason to want that dry patch of dirt surrounded by lots of backwards people.
A bomb exploded inside Richard M. Flynn Power Plant in New York this evening, leaving much of New York City in darkness and an unknown number of casualties. According to officials, a small, but well-placed conventional explosive was detonated around midnight. Normally the electrical grid would route backup power from other plants in the region, however due to malfunction or possibly tampering, the backup system failed to come online.
Early reports by the FBI suggest that two teams of terrorists infiltrated the facility just before midnight, killing a number of guards and causing some damage to plant administrative buildings. Federal agents posted at the facility as part of Orange Alert extra security managed to subdue two of the terrorists, but not in time to stop the plot.
Race-oriented nationalism is inherently racist. We would really prefer that the Palestinians and the Israelis could elect a proportional government, pass some human-rights legislation, and just get along. There are many examples of nations composed of mixed races that work pretty well. Unfortunately, the Zionists and the fundamentalist Muslims have demonstrated that they won't play nice, therefore the adult countries are trying to seperate them for some quiet time.
If both sides weren't racist, the Palestinians would only be pissed off at the UN for forcing them to accept refugees. And the Jews wouldn't mind having minority power in a liberal state. Of course if the Jews were logical, I'm not sure why they would have wanted to live there in the first place (it's not the nicest part of the world, from a geographic perspective).
Zionism may be explainable as a racist reaction to Palestinian racism, but that's not really a mature way to act, is it?
Unfortunately, as much as Perl users often enjoy faking it with multi-line regular expressions, XML is not text. What the web needs know is the successor to Perl: a language with the DOM integrated as well as Perl integrates regular expressions. And with output of structured documents as easy as printf.
I shouldn't have to be thinking about the fact that the data is marked up with tags when I'm parsing it. Instead, I should be able to concentrate on the fact that the data is a tree with subelements and attributes to each node. And I should never have to type angle-brackets when doing output.
I don't know whether XPath will be part of this language -- I haven't done enough real-world development with it to be sure. But I damn well know that the OO-structure of W3C's DOM is not the ultimate tool for the job.
But what about doing it without having the code? Perhaps young apprentices (first-years) could start replicating a program with all the functions specified, then move up to just the architecture, until finally students would be doing black-box reverse-engineering including performance constraints. I think this could be a very successful way to teach programming...
Slashdot Mirror
Your choice of words betrays your point: information is just random facts, it is only when they are coherently integrated that they become data. As far as the article implies, there isn't much in the way of analysis or theoretical conclusions involved in this thesis. His supervisor is right: this is a waste of a PhD student's time and not appropriate for work at this level.
Yes, compiling the information may be hard, but difficulty does not research make. I wouldn't give this guy a PhD until he generates some significant results that could be applied to a country with completely different infrastructure, or even my next game of SimCity (possibly with the inclusion of Terrorist Strike disasters).
True. My first girl was from Estonia :) She was nice.
Sorry, but we don't care whether Estonian girls are "nice", the world has plenty of nice girls to go around. The question is: was she a hottie? Please include pics with your response or don't bother.
A right is something that you can have without taking away someone elses, that's one of the key qualities of it.
Sorry, but not everyone shares your libertarian definition. I should think that the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights can be considered the canonical reference on human rights. The very first line puts "inherent dignity" above "inalienable rights"; the only fundamental right is that of dignity, all other rights can be derived from that (eg: the Ontario Court of Appeal recently ruled that not allowing same-sex couples to marry is a violation of their dignity).
Paying taxes does not violate your dignity.
Article 3 states that "everyone has the right to...liberty", this allows us to deduce Articles 6 through 11 which lay out our rights within the justice system. Unfortunately, fair tribunals cost money. Would you suggest that having to pay for someone else's trial is a violation of your rights? Likewise, Article 21 requires your country to hold costly elections or facilitate democracy in some other way.
Article 3 also states that "everyone has the right to...security of person", which leads to Article 14, forcing your country to accept refugees, and Article 22, the "right to social security". Article 22, we are told, requires the State to use its economic resources to ensure the dignity and the "free development of...personality" for all people.
And the universal human rights which require goods and services just goes on and on. So I think it's safe to conclude that the rest of the world has a very different conception of "right" than you do.
Actually there's significant evidence that West Nile poses no threat to children. Some health officials in Ontario have gone so far as to hint* that intentionally exposing children to the virus will give them an immunity later in life when infection could have negative consequences. To date, an 18-year-old is the youngest fatality in Canada and very few children have come down with any symptoms at all.
* They can't actually recommend this for fear of lawsuits. :(
I don't know how they do it in your human rights backwater, but in Canada* we use common law; ie: innocent until proven guilty. Thank god we have the government to protect mistakenly arrested citizens from monsters like you. Considering how much trouble the police had catching Briere in the first place, I'm not confident they'll be able to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. After all, why release his picture and risk spoiling the jury pool if they already had all the evidence they need? * My Canada does not include Quebec.
You sir, are proof that just because you live in a place doesn't mean you know fuck-all about what is going on there. It's called due diligence, try it before you put your foot in your fucking mouth.
But parent's advice applies to reviews and other articles, certainly posts should not be held to as high a standard. The reviews are the equivalent of speeches or even written-on-dead-trees work, posts are just part of conversation.
/. actually had "editors", maybe we wouldn't be having this discussion. But if 1000s of people are going to read something, there is onus on the authour to put some care into it.
If only
Following the standards isn't extra work, it's required work! Your clients may not be smart enough to explicitly specify it, but you're being hired to produce a site in HTML, not some approxiation to "HTML".
Of course if you slap some shit together in FrontPage and then try to standardise it'll cost more, but if you start out following the standards, I don't find them particularly onerous. (Other than, perhaps, the ALT tags, but hopefully you already have some kind of order to your image files.)
Tables are for displaying tabular data, they are not for layout. Spacing images are a kludge. CSS gives you much better control over layout without having to bend any users over. Slashdot is a nightmare because it's thrown together by people who put no pride in their work and have never bothered to refactor the HTML.
It's true, I've never tried out a screen reader. I trust that if I follow the WAI guidelines and it looks good in Lynx, that's enough. Have you ever read the WAI guidelines or used Lynx? Doesn't sound like it.
You don't shit in their beds so they shouldn't sleep in your washroom?
Maybe if New York had enough homeless shelters the "bums" wouldn't need to purchase reappropriated housing? What does it say about a society where some members feel a need to sleep in public washrooms? At least they're not out on the street where you might have to look at them.
Regardless of the social debate, public pay washrooms in Paris have a solution: the self-cleaning begins 15 minutes after you pay, whether you're still in there, or not.
It only takes double the time if you're just slapping together some crude approximation of HTML to start with. Just following standards gets you most of the way to accessibility. All of your examples of "regular features" are in fact gross abuse of HTML.
They're called Cascading Style Sheets. Nearly everyone's browser supports them. There's a reason they're called "standards". Maybe you'll get more business if you stop trying to fuck every user up the ass?
The point of ICBMs is not to actually deploy nuclear weapons, it's to have the ability to deploy them. Consider four classes of countries:
China and India want to upgrade to World Powers. To do that they need mutually-assured-wounding power. They also need the military infrastructure to send their armies all over the place. The space race fulfills both of these needs.
I think you're missing the point: Plan9 is more than just another Unix kernel, it's the next species in the evolutionary chain. It'd make a lot more sense to grab all the hardware support and shit from Linux and put it in Plan9 than to try and genetically engineer Linux to such a higher state of being.
It's not great stuff: it's fluff! If you've taken any theoretical Computer Science, you'll realise that most of his ideas are fairly trivial and he's just wrapping them in a yummy candy coating for public consumption. Most of his "connections" between math and art or whatever are pretty tenuous and just an excuse for him to ramble on about his favourite things in life.
The only people amazed by GEB are people who aren't well read enough to have come across the ideas before and people whose understanding of the ideas is so tenuous that when he claims there's a deep connection they believe him.
Your brain has been corroded by using shitty programming languages: VB, Pascal, Turing. No wonder you don't like Haskell, it's for people who are smart. Not dumb fucks like you.
Yeah, but Perl's XML interfaces are far from optimal. Many languages support regular expressions, but I think even those who hate Perl would agree that Perl's support is the best.
What I want is a language foo such that:
foo is to XML as Perl is to regular expressions
At least I sure-as-hell haven't been able to get Windows.Forms to work. :(
Perhaps that's why Australia and Canada have the two highest rates of immigration in the world? (Another interesting contrast is Canada's almost non-existant backlash to this policy.)
What do you mean "without provocation"? Israel is a political entity in direct defiance of the rights of the people who previously occupied that piece of land. The neighbouring states may have ulterior motives for not depreciating the Palestinians to the extent that the Western Powers did, but cast in a purely utilitarian light, their actions were consistant with other military campaigns that attempt to prevent ethnic cleansing.
If the Coalition of the Willing tried to set up Kurdistan in your neighbourhood and the Kurds were going to kick you out, I'd help you send them back to Iraq, buddy.
text/xml != text/plain
Regular expressions are not optimal for parsing most of the other forms of text. As XML eclipses plaintext as the most frequent MIME-type of online documents, Perl, with it's close integration of regular expressions, will no longer be the best of all possible duct tapes.
I'm not making a positive policy suggestion here. I'm simply pointing out that Zionism is racist (or at least excessively greedy) and anti-Zionists are usually racist. It appears that the only short-term solution is to seperate the fighting children.
Non-immigrant nations are not fully adult. Adolescent, at the most. Also: chronological age has nothing to do with maturity; maturity is a state of mind.
The only non-prejudiced way to define a group of people is by shared beliefs. And if those beliefs happen to be religion, then the defined group is archaic.
I theorise that the non-religious beliefs held by the Jews of Europe at the end of WW2 would give them no reason to want that dry patch of dirt surrounded by lots of backwards people.
A bomb exploded inside Richard M. Flynn Power Plant in New York this evening, leaving much of New York City in darkness and an unknown number of casualties. According to officials, a small, but well-placed conventional explosive was detonated around midnight. Normally the electrical grid would route backup power from other plants in the region, however due to malfunction or possibly tampering, the backup system failed to come online.
Early reports by the FBI suggest that two teams of terrorists infiltrated the facility just before midnight, killing a number of guards and causing some damage to plant administrative buildings. Federal agents posted at the facility as part of Orange Alert extra security managed to subdue two of the terrorists, but not in time to stop the plot.
Race-oriented nationalism is inherently racist. We would really prefer that the Palestinians and the Israelis could elect a proportional government, pass some human-rights legislation, and just get along. There are many examples of nations composed of mixed races that work pretty well. Unfortunately, the Zionists and the fundamentalist Muslims have demonstrated that they won't play nice, therefore the adult countries are trying to seperate them for some quiet time.
If both sides weren't racist, the Palestinians would only be pissed off at the UN for forcing them to accept refugees. And the Jews wouldn't mind having minority power in a liberal state. Of course if the Jews were logical, I'm not sure why they would have wanted to live there in the first place (it's not the nicest part of the world, from a geographic perspective).
Zionism may be explainable as a racist reaction to Palestinian racism, but that's not really a mature way to act, is it?
Unfortunately, as much as Perl users often enjoy faking it with multi-line regular expressions, XML is not text. What the web needs know is the successor to Perl: a language with the DOM integrated as well as Perl integrates regular expressions. And with output of structured documents as easy as printf.
I shouldn't have to be thinking about the fact that the data is marked up with tags when I'm parsing it. Instead, I should be able to concentrate on the fact that the data is a tree with subelements and attributes to each node. And I should never have to type angle-brackets when doing output.
I don't know whether XPath will be part of this language -- I haven't done enough real-world development with it to be sure. But I damn well know that the OO-structure of W3C's DOM is not the ultimate tool for the job.
But what about doing it without having the code? Perhaps young apprentices (first-years) could start replicating a program with all the functions specified, then move up to just the architecture, until finally students would be doing black-box reverse-engineering including performance constraints. I think this could be a very successful way to teach programming...